Show admin-cropped thumbnails instead of WordPress-cropped thumbnails

Description

Used to be able to see which images have been cropped (and which ones haven't) in image search results. Now have to click 'edit image' and check the image individually.

It's valuable for the publisher to see what his/her readers will see on the front end of the site when the 'thumbnail' function is called (either publisher's hard-cropped image or full un-cropped image). Useful especially for publishers that are pulling images from a time before 'thumbnails' existed in WP.

Main reason this is an issue is that when an un-cropped thumbnail is selected as the featured image, it will be stretched/distorted to dimensions of thumbnail settings in function.php.

As mentioned at ticket #22962 in 3.5 it isn't a magic crop but the original scaled down. That counts for search results as sidebar result.
The only place where the thumbnail is showed is the media library.

As mentioned at ticket #22962 in 3.5 it isn't a magic crop but the original scaled down. That counts for search results as sidebar result.
The only place where the thumbnail is showed is the media library.

When I say 'magic crop' I mean Wordpress is showing only the center portion of the original image. This is the behavior in search results. I'm advocating to either show the original image in its entirety (scaled down) in those results or the 'thumbnail' version of the image as it would be called from functions.php. As of 3.4, we had the ability to view the 'thumbnail' in the search results of the media manager. I'm just making a UX recommendation to bring that capability back.

Scaled down has been discussed and it not going to happen. It's nicer that all images have the same size.
Not sure why the thumbnail isn't used. Maybe because of the need for retina images and that doesn't count for thumbnail images.

If you want to change the main view I think you have a special need that the normal user doesn't have and that a plugin should take care of it. But that's me.

I do have to say that it would be cool if there would be a link to open a new model that shows all image sizes that aren't just resized images but where cropped or manipulated in a different way.